Capernaum was a prosperous town in a rich and fertile area. The reliable historian Josephus, writing thirty years after Jesus died, recorded that “the whole area is excellent for cattle and crops and rich in forests of all kinds, so that by its adaptability it invites even those least inclined to work the land. Consequently every unit has been cultivated by its inhabitants and not a corner goes to waste. It is thickly studded with towns, and thanks to the natural abundance the innumerable villages are so densely populated that the smallest has more than fifteen thousand inhabitants.”
The whole area fell into disrepair with the Muslim triumphs of the seventh century and by the time of Twain’s visit it must have been near its lowest ebb. Sitting in the shade at Capernaum I hear a guide tell a Christian tour group that until the British Mandate of 1917 Galilee had been a sort of Wild West, a lawless land used only for plunder by the Bedouin and taxes by the Turks. Apart from the incorrect date (the British Mandate started in 1922) it seems like a correct analysis and ties in with Twain’s own description of Capernaum and its surroundings.
***
Since his visit in 1867 archaeologists have been finding out much more about the Capernaum that was Jesus’ home - or more accurately His base - for those three or four years. The remains of the large synagogue are from the fourth century, but under that they have discovered an earlier, first-century synagogue. This earlier building was uncommonly substantial too, built with Greco-Roman influences. The latest guesswork is that it was built by a Jew who had traded abroad successfully, returned with funds for the synagogue and had it designed along the lines of a particular temple he had seen in his travels. It would have been in this synagogue that the Synoptic Gospels tell us that Jesus preached - and in particular healed.
Of course, this cannot be seen by the tourist today, but still there is something in the air. Mark Twain said that “all desolate and unpeopled as it was, it was illustrious ground. From it sprang that tree of Christianity whose broad arms overshadow so many distant lands to-day. After Christ was tempted of the devil in the desert, he came here and began his teachings; and during the three or four years he lived afterward, this place was his home almost altogether.” Although the site has been developed as far as it can be since then, Twain’s summary still holds true. On the one hand there really isn’t that much to see, while on the other its evocative reverberations for anyone brought up anywhere near Christianity is profound: this really is where you can walk in His footsteps in hallowed ground.
A few miles beyond Capernaum lies the new Israeli village of Migdal on what was once the site of Magdala, and by tradition the birthplace of Mary Magdalene. It was bought by Russian Zionists in 1910, and so for an Israeli village it has some pre-independence provenance. It is in fact a very sound suburban settlement, not big enough to be called a town and not dead enough to be called a dormitory. The streets are wide, swept clean and speed bumped, the houses plentifully spaced, two-storied with copious foliage and individu- ally designed, swimming pools sunbathe in the gardens, the children play on the streets and in the bright plastic colored playground. Even the birds keep their voices down. Stultifying respectability is Migdal’s message.
***
This is Migdal today; this was Magdala in 1867: “Magdala is not a beautiful place. It is thoroughly Syrian, and that is to say that it is thoroughly ugly, and cramped, squalid, uncomfortable, and filthy. The streets of Magdala are anywhere from three to six feet wide, and reeking with uncleanliness. The houses are from five to seven feet high, and all built upon one arbitrary plan - the ungraceful form of a dry-goods box. There are no windows to a Syrian hut, and no chimneys.
“As we rode into Magdala not a soul was visible. But the ring of the horses’ hoofs roused the stupid population, and they all came trooping out - old men and old women, boys and girls, the blind, the crazy, and the crippled, all in ragged, soiled and scanty raiment, and all abject beggars by nature, instinct and education. How the vermin-tortured vagabonds did swarm! They hung to the horses’ tails, clung to their manes and the stirrups, closed in on every side in scorn of dangerous hoofs - and out of their infidel throats, with one accord, burst an agonizing and most infernal chorus: ‘Howajji, bucksheesh! howajji, bucksheesh! howajji, bucksheesh! bucksheesh! bucksheesh!’ I never was in a storm like that before.”
Later that day he could not resist one final dig and wrote in his notebook: “The people of this region in the Bible were just as they are now, ignorant, depraved, superstitious, dirty, lousy, thieving vagabonds.”
Having got that off his chest Mark Twain and the caravanserai ventured two hours further south to Tiberias, then as now the main town on the Sea of Galilee. They camped overnight in what must have been somewhat less than a town. He wasn’t too impressed with Tiberias either: “Squalor and poverty are the pride of Tiberias.” The only squalor and poverty there now refer to the architecture. Tiberias was unfortunate enough to be declared by the early Israeli government of the 1950s as a holiday resort and so is covered in horribly ugly Soviet-style hotels to which early developers have added some equally ugly 1960s package tour-style hotels and then later developers filled up the outskirts with some equally ugly 1970s Spanish Costa-style hotels. After that they all gave up, as indeed have the tourists. Tiberias today is a tourist ghost town, all dressed down with nothing to show.
***
I wish Mark Twain could have been in Tiberias seventeen years later when he would have come across a remarkable twenty-three-year-old Scotsman called David Torrance. Torrance was a Church of Scotland enthusiast and a newly qualified doctor. The Church of Scotland, like many other Protestant churches, had taken it upon itself to convert the wayward Jews to Christianity. Tiberias was, and is, one of the four most important centers of Judaism and yet there was no hospital. Torrance decided to build this hospital, with a Church of Scotland kirk alongside it, and duly bought Ottoman permission to do so.
This hospital evolved and expanded and was the major care center in Galilee until the new Israeli government built a state hospital in Tiberias in the late 1950s. The Church of Scotland decided to convert the hospital into a hotel, and to use any profits to improve the missionary work of the kirk. Today the hotel stands proud in the prime position in Tiberias, within its own tropical grounds complete with pool and in fact does not look as incongruous as one might imagine: the Scottish baronial manse-style is uncannily Ottoman - only the saltire and an almost-kitsch St. Andrew (himself a Galilean) statue in the garden give the game away on first acquaintance.
It was in Tiberias later that day that Mark Twain had his first sighting of the ultraorthodox Jews, the haredim: “They say that the lanky, dyspeptic-looking body-snatchers, with the indescribable hats on, and a long curl dangling down in front of each ear, are the old, familiar, self-righteous Pharisees we read of in the Scriptures. Verily, they look it. Judging merely by their general style, and without other evidence, one might easily suspect that self-righteousness was their specialty.”
It’s not known whether he ever saw any body-snatchers in the US before he left; he certainly never wrote about them. There were two synagogues in San Francisco when he lived there in the early 1860s, founded simultaneously as the congregation could not decide whether to follow the German or Anglo-Polish patterns of worship. There was only one, on 19th Street, in New York when he was there just before the Quaker City sailed. If he had seen any ultraorthodox Jews they would seem not to have made the same impression on him on home soil as they did here in Holy Land.
Before leaving England to follow in Mark Twain’s footsteps and write this book I wanted to clarify the Jewish phenomenon in my own mind. We have probably all seen the junk email about the Jews and the Muslims and the Nobel Prizes: how the Muslims are twenty per cent of the world’s population and have seven Nobel Prizes (including, bizarrely, one for that ghastly murderer Yasser Arafat, or as Bruno says on hearing this, WTF?) while the Jews25 with 0.02 p
er cent of the world’s population have one hundred and twenty-nine Nobel Prizes. Why so? And beyond the hallowed halls of Nobel why in any sphere of human endeavor - the arts, scholarship, the sciences, business, politics, the law, the media, entertainment (but not, interestingly enough, sport) do the Jews excel way beyond any statistical justification for their achievements? Why, in other words, do they seem to us Gentiles as being programmed to excel?
In London I put all this to my worldly-wise friend Saul Isaroff, to my son’s best friend Dominic Roter and to my old school friend and rabbi’s son Robert Armstrong. Between them they hold an encyclopedic knowledge of Jewry whether Israeli or diasporic, ultraorthodox or long lapsed, historical or current. Saul is a collector of Jewish facts and folklore from near and far; Dominic was brought up in a Jewish home and has what I imagine is a typically modern secular approach to Jewry: he knows the Orthodox ropes when needed but isn’t averse to a bacon sandwich when he pops over to us for breakfast. Robert was brought up in a household of Twainian piety; and like the young Twain he rebelled when his mind was old enough to think freely and for itself.
So why, I asked all my friends, why all this excelling? Well, firstly to say this is a short book, and we are already veering off-subject, so bear with me and some sweeping generalizations. The answers can be boiled down to religion and upbringing. The religious aspect is divided between the written law and the oral law and this encourages the central Jewish phenomenon of debate and questioning. A child growing up will be encouraged to question every- thing, secular as well as religious, and it is a given that a Jewish mind should be an enquiring mind. Religiously this leads to endless schisms. Some take the written law literally as God-given; others take it poetically as inspired by wisdom - but not by God; others view it as a man-made survival technique - and none the worse for that, just leave out the divinity. The former aren’t inclined to let the latter live and let live, and to be one side or the other of this fence is another part of the Jewish phenomenon.
The upbringing aspect reflects the Jewish experience in the last two thousand years in exile. At different times and in different places all over Europe Jews were forbidden from owning property or practicing certain professions or practicing their religion - after all, it wasn’t until twenty years after the Second World War that the Vatican finally accepted that Judaism as a whole was not to be held responsible for the death of their Catholic Christ. With this experience of discrimination and deprivation - and one of which the Holocaust was a climactic conclusion - survival inevitably meant self-succor, education and excellence, and excellence inevitably led to achieve- ment and achievement inevitably led to jealousy and jealousy inevitably led to the pogroms and the circle was - equally inevitably - repeated.
These are causes and effects: the religion and the upbringing, the questioning and the excellence and both can be seen as alive and well in Israel now, as indeed can be seen the less attractive side-effects of intensity and fervor and a lack of what used to be called gaiety and what is still called charm. In Syria, when I said we are going to Israel I was met by blank looks of incomprehension and disinterest; I might as well have said I was going to the rogue planet Cha 110913-773444. In Israel, when I say I have just come from Syria the questions start straight away. How much is a falafel? Did they have many newspapers? Internet? What, wifi or cable? Is there sales tax or is it all cash? Even with a credit card no tax? No credit card? ATMs? Anyone speak English? Likewise when I arrive in Israel by sea and the marinistas see Vasco da Gama. She has an unusual rig. In marinas in Turkey, Syria and Lebanon people looked, paused for a second and passed on. In Israel it’s: what’s the advantage? If it’s simpler why is it more expensive? Which came first, wishbones or windsurf- ers? Wishbones? So why does it look like a windsurfer? And so on. Later in Jerusalem I overheard a guide tell his (Christian) group that the Jews were wonderful tourists because they asked so many questions about the country they had come to live in, whereas the Arabs either thought they knew it all or were not interested.
A fascinating consequence of the constant questioning - and I’m sorry, we’ll return to Mark Twain in a moment - is its effect in the military. Every boy and girl, and until forty-five every man, is what is called “a fighter”. When they start soldiering the questions start too, and as any officer will affirm, unquestioning acceptance of fighting orders once the fighting starts is better than starting a debate about the orders. There’s a special unit in the army to deal with this phenomenon - and beyond that a facility for any fighter to question a superior once the fighting stops.
***
Now back to Mark Twain: unless any reader reading his comments about the body-snatchers thinks that he was anti-Semitic I can assure them that this is simply not the case. Later in life he wrote that: “I am without prejudice. It is my hope that both the Christians and the Jews will be damned; and to that end I am working all my influence. Help me pray... If I have any leaning it is toward the Jew, not the Christian. Christianity has deluged the world with blood and tears - Judaism has caused neither for religion’s sake.”
Less flippantly he remarked: “A few years ago a Jew observed to me that there was no uncourteous reference to his people in my books, and asked how it happened. It happened because the disposition was lacking. I am quite sure that I have no race prejudices, and I think I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. Indeed, I know it. I can stand any society. All that I care to know is that a man is a human being - that is enough for me; he can’t be any worse.
“The Jew is not a disturber of the peace of any country. He is not a loafer, he is not a sot, he is not noisy, he is not a brawler nor a rioter, he is not quarrelsome. In the statistics of crime his presence is conspicuously rare - he is a stranger to the hangman.
“That the Jewish home is a home in the truest sense is a fact which no one will dispute. The family is knitted together by the strongest affections; its members show each other every due respect; and reverence for the elders is an inviolate law of the house. The Jew is not a burden on the charities of the state nor of the city; these could cease from their functions without affecting him. When he is well enough, he works; when he is incapacitated, his own people take care of him. And not in a poor and stingy way, but with a fine and large benevolence. His race is entitled to be called the most benevolent of all the races of men.”
But there’s no doubt that Twain found the body-snatchers disagreeable, partly because he couldn’t agree with their Pharisee-ish self-righteousness and partly because he couldn’t follow how they could believe in a doctrine of divine preference. Twain’s - and the writer’s - view of a personal god, a male god, a separate being that had to be worshipped and obeyed, a god distinct from his creation and not an integral part of it, within us all, can be summarized thus:
The best minds will tell you that when a man has begotten a child he is morally bound to tenderly care for it, protect it from hurt, shield it from disease, clothe it, feed it, bear with its waywardness, lay no hand upon it save in kindness and for its own good, and never in any case inflict upon it a wanton cruelty. God’s treatment of his earthly children, every day and every night, is the exact opposite of all that, yet those best minds warmly justify these crimes, condone them, excuse them, and indignantly refuse to regard them as crimes at all, when he commits them. Your country and mine is an interesting one, but there is nothing there that is half so interesting as the human mind.
Twain could not intellectually grasp the concept behind: “a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single one happy; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave us angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell, mouths me
rcy and invented hell, mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people, and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites his poor abused slave to worship him!”
***
The writer has the same trouble squaring the Abrahamic circle today. Granted, up to a point, Mark Twain’ view: “The Jews have the best average brain of any people in the world. They are peculiarly and conspicuously the world’s intellectual aristocracy.” Fine, but if so, how can the “body-snatchers”, the religious vanguard who have kept the candle, real and metaphorical, burning all these centuries actually believe that three thousand illiterate and superstitious years ago Moses was given a covenant from a god who became not one god for all humanity - a strange enough concept in itself - but a divisive god, a racist god, a sadistic god, a vengeful god, a sexist god, a god that if alive today would be arrested on the spot?
It is not really even possible to suggest that those unlettered tribesmen believed all this three millennia ago, as they understood life through what the Greeks called mythos and not what the same Greeks called logos. Like all ancients they used logos to sharpen their weapons, to observe the movements in the night sky and ultimately to survive. But logos could never explain the inexplicable, what we still call the mysteries of life, either personal emotions or natural phenomena. For that they used mythos. Myths were never intended to be factually correct as they were, by definition, dealing with layers of under- standing beyond the factual, the explicable. It would never have occurred to the authors of the Old Testament that the texts would be taken literally.
Innocence and War Page 16
